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| Laura Brown |
The U.S. Supreme Court decided wrongly against parents this week in the Schaffer v. Weast decision to place the burden of proof on parents when disputing the adequacy of their child’s special education program.
The decision assumes that government bureaucrats know what is best for children. Parents can opt out of mandatory government education to determine their child’s education program only if they have the money to pay for private placement and services or -- if poor -- can legally prove that their child is being harmed by an inadequate program.
Take the case of Anthony Tran, a 13-year-old boy with autism whose parents are Vietnamese with English as a second language. When I met Anthony 5 years ago, as an 8-years-old, he was being "housed" at Hale Kula Elementary School on Schofield Barracks in Central Oahu. He could not speak at all, but his teacher insisted he could say words as complex as "hamburger." No picture system of communication was provided for him.
Upon reviewing his file, I discovered that he had only been given an IQ test for verbal students and from that the school determined that his IQ was in the deficient range. The teacher said, "You have to have realistic expectations for him." The parents asked for an independent evaluation for non-verbal children. The principal fought their request. The parents removed their child to a school specializing in autism, where it was discovered that he had speech apraxia requiring specialized treatment.
Would it have been better for the parents to entrust their child to the "experts," who had not even bothered to find out what instruction the child needed to learn, as required by law? That’s what happened to a 19-year-old boy with Down Syndrome on Molokai. He failed to learn during his later years in school and was only able to speak two words at a time. The parents finally sued the DOE. They had trusted the "experts." They didn’t have the choice of anything but government education, because they did not have money for or access to adequate programs.
The child and parents were both severely penalized for the rest of their lives in this case. The DOE suffered no consequence, because it was Hawaii’s taxpayers who paid out millions in damages for the school’s "deliberate indifference."
The basic premise of special education law is flawed: it requires a team comprised of a teacher, principal, parents and others to develop an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). The panel then can identify a child’s needs and develop accommodations that would give that child access to the general curriculum.
Parents are naturally trusting of educators and assume that they know what they are doing. But administrators are restrained by their budgets and are not trained in or knowledgeable about learning differences and disabilities in children. They defer to district "gatekeepers" and the attorney general’s office before agreeing to services for children. Letters sent out recently by Hawaii’s attorney general denies transportation charges even if they are written into a child’s IEP -- a clear violation of regulations under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA).
Parents who are not happy with services provided by their neighborhood government-run school should be given vouchers to attend a school that will meet their children’s needs. Is there any parent who believes that the government knows their child’s needs better than they do?
Laura Brown is the education reporter and researcher for HawaiiReporter.com and the education policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. She can be reached via email at mailto:laurabrown@hawaii.rr.com
This editorial is intended to provoke thought, discussion and an examination of issues. It does not reflect official policy of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. See the GRIH Web site at: http://www.grassrootinstitute.org/
HawaiiReporter.com reports the real news, and prints all editorials submitted, even if they do not represent the viewpoint of the editors, as long as they are written clearly. Send editorials to mailto:Malia@HawaiiReporter.com
Offshoots
THE WAR AGAINST THE CAR
Daily Policy Digest
ENERGY ISSUES
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The simplistic notion that the car is an environmental doomsday machine reveals an ignorance of history, says Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal. A century ago, the auto was hailed as one of the greatest environmental inventions of all time because the horse, which it replaced, was a prodigious polluter, dropping 40 pounds of waste a day.
Although environmental groups and politicians are not likely to break Americans from their love affair with cars -- big, convenient, safe cars -- no matter how guilty they try to make drivers feel, they are using more subtle forms of coercion, warns Moore.
For instance:
The left is now pining for a $1-a-gallon gas tax to make driving unaffordable.
Washington has wasted over $60 billion of federal gas tax money on mass transit systems, yet fewer Americans ride them now than before the deluge of subsidies began.
When the voters in car-crazed Los Angeles opted to fund an ill-fated subway system, most drivers who voted “yes” said they did so because they hoped it would compel other people off the crowded highways.
The roads are crammed with tens of millions of cars and Americans drive 8 billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways, says Moore. Americans want more open roads and highways, and energy policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive.
Source: Stephen Moore, “The War Against the Car,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2005.
For text:
http://www.reason.org/outofcontrol/archives/2005/11/the_war_against.html
For more on Energy:
http://eteam.ncpa.org/issues/?c=national-energy-policy
Sprout of the Day
“The natural order of things requires that the maker shall produce his goods and display them for the inspection of the buyer who is, at all times, free not to buy. The right to buy or not to buy is vital to economic well-being and, of course, to personal liberty.”
- Sir Ernest Benn
